The 77th JSAP Autumn Meeting, 2016

Presentation information

Oral presentation

3 Optics and Photonics » 3.1 Basic optics and frontier of optics

[14a-B9-1~13] 3.1 Basic optics and frontier of optics

Wed. Sep 14, 2016 9:00 AM - 12:30 PM B9 (Exhibition Hall)

Wataru Inami(Shizuoka Univ.)

12:15 PM - 12:30 PM

[14a-B9-13] Phase Difference Amplification with Intensity Interferometry and Its Implication

Tomohiro Shirai1 (1.AIST)

Keywords:intensity correlation, interferometric measurement, quantum imaging

Intensity interferometry has been devised to determine the angular diameters of radio stars and of visible stars in the 1950s. It provides information about the correlation between intensity fluctuations, often referred to as the Hanbury Brown–Twiss effect. The discovery of this effect can be considered a milestone in the development of quantum optics.

Although it was originally employed in astronomy, intensity interferometry has recently found useful applications in different branches of physics, such as electron physics and ultracold atom physics. More recently, it seems that the traditional form of intensity interferometry with classical light has received renewed attention especially in connection with classical counterparts of quantum imaging, such as ghost imaging with classical light and quantum-mimetic optical coherence tomography.

In this paper we demonstrate theoretically and experimentally that, as a novel function of classical intensity interferometry, a phase difference distribution recorded as an interferogram can be enhanced by a factor of 2 on the basis of the classical intensity correlation. Such phase difference amplification is, in general, known to be practically important since it works to increase sensitivity and accuracy in interferometric measurements. The method proposed in this study prevails over the existing methods in the sense that it can be readily implemented without any difficulties in comparison with all other methods so far proposed, although the phase difference enhancement is limited to a factor of 2 in our method.